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John F. Enders - Biographical

John
Franklin Enders was born on February 10th, 1897, at West
Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A. He is the son of John Ostrom
Enders, a banker in Hartford, and Harriet Goulden Enders
(née Whitmore).

Enders was educated at the Noah Webster School at Hartford and
St. Paul's
School in Concord, New Hampshire. Finishing school in 1915,
he went to Yale
University, but in 1917 left his studies there to become, in
1918, a pilot in the U.S. Air Force with the rank of Ensign.
After the First World War he returned to Yale and was given, in
1919, the degree of B.A. (honoris causa) and the normal
degree in 1920.

He then went into business in real estate in Hartford, but,
becoming dissatisfied with this, he entered Harvard University.
For four years he studied English literature and Germanic and
Celtic languages with the idea of becoming a teacher of English,
but he was not satisfied with this career either. He had been for
a long time interested in biology and this interest was
reawakened by his friendships with medical students at Harvard,
with the result that he decided to enter as a candidate for the
Ph.D. degree in bacteriology and immunology. In coming to this
decision he was influenced by the late Professor Hans Zinsser,
who was then Head of the Department of Bacteriology and
Immunology at Harvard and by Dr. H. K. Ward, who later became
Professor of Bacteriology at the University of
Sidney, Australia.

In 1930, Enders received the degree of Ph.D. at Harvard for a
thesis which presented evidence that bacterial anaphylaxis and
hypersensitivity of the tuberculin type are distinct
phenomena.

From 1930 until 1946, Enders remained at Harvard as a member of
the teaching staff. During this period he studied, first, the
elucidation of certain factors related to bacterial virulence and
the resistance of the host organism. He then clarified, in
collaboration with Ward, Shaffer, Wu, and others the inhibitory
effect of the type specific capsular polysaccharides of
Pneumococcus upon the phagocytic process. This work
discovered a new form of Type I polysaccharide and produced
evidence that complement played a catalytic-like part in the
opsonization of bacteria by specific antibody.

In 1938, Enders began the study of some of the mammalian viruses,
and undertook, in 1941, in collaboration with Cohen, Kane,
Levens, Stokes and others, a study of the virus of mumps. This
work provided serological tests for the diagnosis of this disease
and a skin test for susceptibility to it, and demonstrated the
immunizing effect of inactivated mumps virus and the possibility
of attenuating the virulence of this virus by passing it through
chick embryos. It was shown that mumps often occurs in a form
that is not apparent, but nevertheless confers a resistance which
is as effective as that conferred by the visible disease.

In 1946, Enders was asked to establish a laboratory for research
in infectious diseases at the Children's Medical Center at
Boston. In this laboratory much outstanding work on the viral
diseases of man has been done under his direction and it was here
that the work was done on the cultivation of the poliomyelitis
viruses for which Enders was awarded, together with T. H. Weller and F. C.
Robbins, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in
1954.

Since this time Enders has returned, in collaboration with
Peebles, to his earlier work on measles. He is now Higgins
University Professor at Harvard University and Chief of the
Research Division of Infectious Diseases of the Children's
Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Enders is a member of a great number of American learned
societies, the Society for General Microbiology and the
Royal Society for the Promotion of Health in Great Britain, the
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher (Leopoldina),
and is Foreign Corresponding Member of the British Medical
Association and the Académie Royale de Médicine de
Belgique.

He married Sarah Frances Bennett, of Brookline, Massachusetts, in
1927. She died in 1943, and in 1951 Enders married Carolyn B.
Keane of Newton Center, Massachusetts. He has one son John Ostrom
Enders II, one daughter, Sarah Enders, and a stepson, William
Edmund Keane.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.